The Fallen
by Allicat9
Summary: They were a motley collection; a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish gravitating toward a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty-Death Eaters died during the Battle... Please R& R!
1. Whimper

John Alexander Avery Jr. goes out with a whimper and that would have made his father ashamed of him.

That's his last thought, pathetic as it is. After all he's seen, all the people he's killed, all the families he's torn apart, after _Azkaban_, and he's still just that little boy with straw colored hair who wants his daddy to be proud of him.

John Alexander Avery Jr. whimpers as Oliver Wood's large booted foot crushes his neck and snaps his spinal cord and thinks of his father.


	2. Fall

David Bancroft fell to his death.

He fell down the stairs when his father threw him.

He fell into the Wrong Crowd in school.

He fell out of love with his wife and into the arms of another woman.

He fell into drink.

He fell into becoming a Snatcher.

So when Sarah Bancroft finds her father's broken body in the ravine next to what was the covered bridge up to the school, she feels nothing but satisfaction.

After all, he always _fell_.


	3. Laugh

Bellatrix Lestrange was laughing when she died.

In a way, it was fitting. Bella Black was known in school for being a bit of a trouble maker. Her laugh had echoed through the halls of Hogwarts many, many times.

Her laugh, loud and wild and free, had turned as many heads as her dark beauty and deep grey eyes.

"I swear Bella, you'll die laughing!" Andromeda had always had a way of stating things that made them happen, that made them true. Back before the war, back when Bella and Dromeda were so close, those that knew them best sometimes had trouble telling them apart; Andromeda had known her sister better than anyone.

But the War and Azkaban had changed all of that, had ravaged Bella's face beyond all recognition. Her laugh was also altered, darker, gone.

Instead of clear, it was hoarse. Instead of uninhibited, it was crazed.

Bellatrix Lestrange was laughing when she died. In a way it was fitting. But Andromeda couldn't help but feel that everything was very, very wrong.


	4. Smash

By the time they remember the Carrows, it's too late.

The two of them are still restrained and virtually unrecognizable, faces bloodied beyond all recognition.

Amycus Carrow's attack was particularly vicious. His head is smashed in, his brains spread across the blue rug of the Ravenclaw common room in a macabre tribute to the brains that 'set Ravenclaws apart'.

Whoever did it never comes forward to claim their glory.


	5. Futile

Alecto dies in a hospital room in St. Mungo's two days after the battle.

There was some debate over taking her there. Some want to leave her to bleed out. Neville Longbottom champions her cause, urges the others to get her medical care.

In the end they decide to be the better people and scrape her off the Ravenclaw common room floor and ferry what's left of her to the hospital.

They needn't have bothered really. Alecto's injuries are too great-who ever attacked the Carrows backed up their beating with curses that make healing her wounds almost impossible. She never stirs in her hospital bed.

In the end, the gesture of mercy given by the heroes of Hogwarts to Alecto Carrow is futile. She dies anyway.


	6. Flesh

Tom Riddle's shell rots in a grave next to his muggle family. His grave is at their feet, a position he would have despised. He is given no coffin.

The headstone is simple and reads only this-

_Here lies Thomas Marvolo Riddle; December 25__th__ 1927-May 2__nd__ 1998-All flesh decays. All men die. _


	7. Fitting

Antonin Dolohav had murdered many, many people in his life. He had murdered his sister's dog when his parents had thrown her a surprise birthday. He murdered his first wife when he discovered she was stepping out. He had murdered men, women, and children. Old and Young. Elder statesmen, shopkeepers, students. Antonin had even cast the curse that murdered the Prewett twins.

But he had never expected to _be_ murdered. Especially not by the ancient little halfbreed that had taught him charms. As he gasps his last breath and watches his internal organs ooze out of the foot long gash in his stomach, he supposes that his death is oddly fitting in a way.


	8. Collapse

Thorfinn Rowle was a big man in life and a big corpse in death. It took three people to move him from the third floor classroom where he died.

His wife was a tiny woman with wispy blonde hair and brown eyes too large for her face. When she saw her husband's body she collapsed onto his large, still chest and sobbed.


	9. Justice

They find one of Walden Macnair's arms. Just one. It was torn off in a way that left the shoulder partially attached and left hanging from what had been an Acromantula's web.

The students that discovered the grisly scene were horrified, unsure if the arms belonged to one of the defenders or a Death Eater. After a few days, Macnair's sister manages to id the arm because of the scar on Walden's left forefinger. The one she accidently gave him when they were playing around as children.

He never told anyone, but Hagrid was secretly pleased that Macnair had ended up a snack for one of the spiders. It felt like justice.


	10. Gurgle

Fernier Greyback's last kill is a fifteen year old girl. She pisses him off when the battle resumes, blasts him away from an older girl he had been wrestling with. He is on her before she can react, lifting her up by her hair and ripping into her throat. She can't scream, she just gurgles and he tosses her out of the window closest to him in disgust.

Someone is screaming though. The other girl, the older one, tries to run around him to the window, as though she can save the girl he just threw. He shoves her in the chest and she flies into a suit of armor and slides to the floor. She is wandless, he already disarmed her, and pretty. Fernier licks his lips, he can take his time with her, now that the other one is gone. She is motionless against the wall. He tries to scare her and lunges at her.

She moves impossibly quickly. One moment she was huddled against the wall, the next, her arm is extended in front of her, her hand grasping the sword from the suit of armor. Fernier impales himself, the blade slicing through his neck easily. His surprised brown eyes meet her tear-filled blue ones.

She drops the sword, picks up her wand and flees down the stairs. Fernier drops to the ground, hands grasping at his throat. He chokes, gurgles, and dies, his own blood filling his lungs.


	11. Memorial

Severus Snape gets a memorial.

It is vandalized almost immediately.

Because even though he may have been good, he sometimes did things that were very bad. The people he helped, they remember him. But the people he hurt, they remember him too.


	12. Rot

The bodies of the six fallen giants rot in the summer sun.

They are too large to vanish at first, and no one knows what else there is to do with them. There is no one to claim them. There is no one to tell them their names.

It's not until the smell becomes overwhelming that Hermione Granger and Minerva McGonagall take care of them.


	13. 41

Its slow work going through the bodies at the bottom of the ravine. A eleven story drop did nothing to preserve the bodies-to make them easier to identify.

Hardly any relatives come to claim the Snatchers. In the post Voldemort world they live in, it's an embarrassment to be related to someone that was once so desperate.

They identify some. Hermione turns out to be a dab hand at identification spells, and Yarnan, a pale, drawn girl, once pretty, seems to have a knack for finding wands.

It takes months to finish it all. So many other things take precedence. Rebuilding the castle, rehiring the staff, collecting the honored dead, going to funerals, memorializing the fallen. By the time their through with the bodies in the ravine, the cold November frost had settled in.

In all seventy seven people took the plunge into the ravine that night. Forty one unidentified bodies are buried in a mass grave.


	14. Bad Guy

Nicolas Scabior was not a bad guy.

Not really anyway.

He was a saint compared to his brother.

Which one of them was doing time in Azkaban for assault after all?

So he helped chuck a few mudbloods in the slammer. So what? What use were they anyway?

So he got a little frisky with some of his prettier female captives. So what? They were stupid enough to get captured-they deserved what he did to them.

So he was a little grey when it came to the moral directives on murder and torture. So what? A guy had to have a little fun once in a while.

He wasn't a bad guy.

Not really.

And that was his last thought before he hit the ground.


End file.
